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5 Surprising Things You Should be Cleaning Every Day

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Raise your hand if you have an overflowing laundry basket at home. Okay, now keep your hand raised if you didn’t have time to sweep your floors today. Yep, that’s everyone’s hand still raised… except maybe Mary Poppins down the back there.

Our busy lives can make it hard for us to stick to a cleaning routine, our time is finite after all… but these five items are vital to clean daily and forgetting about them can have serious health ramifications.

Forget the laundry and concentrate on these daily household chores to keep your home in tip top shape.

The Dishes

Sorry but it’s true. Associate Professor Barbara Mullan from Curtin University’s school of psychology told ABC, “Bacteria will stay alive on surfaces, even clean surfaces, for up to four days. So on dishes that have contamination like food particles, bacteria can stay alive for a very long time.”

The only solution? “Try to keep on top of the dishes,” she said.

The Kitchen Sink

Kelly A. Reynolds, PhD, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Arizona’s Zuckerman College of Public Health in Tucson, told Woman’s Day, “There can be millions of pathogens (disease-causing germs) clinging to the sink, the seal of the drain and the rubber gasket around the garbage disposal,” says Dr. Reynolds.

Same as above, if you keep on top of cleaning your kitchen sink there shouldn’t be a problem.

The Coffee Maker

Your coffee maker can very quickly become a hot bed of warm, moist bacteria growth. A dirty coffee maker can also affect the taste of the brew, making your coffee taste oily and or chalky. Trying cleaning your coffee maker by running a cycle with diluted vinegar and water.

The Microwave

It’s a myth that your microwave kills all the bacteria inside it when you use it. “Bacteria are resilient and can lie dormant if you’re not regularly disinfecting the surface,” says Dr. Reynolds. Make sure you’re wiping out the microwave daily, and clean up spills as they happen to stop microbes from multiplying.

The Kitchen Floor

Do not forget about your kitchen floor, unless you want to meet an invasion of the bug variety. Your kitchen floors are the first place bugs enter and dwell when hygiene levels slip (no judgment, it happens). All you have to do is a quick five-minute daily sweep and bulk it up to a 10 minute or so sweep every second day.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Now to Love.

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